CCAC Talks To YouTube/Google About Quality CC

Here’s a letter that two of our volunteers sent to YouTube/Google last week. It’s one part of CCAC continuing MEDIA captioning advocacy. YT/Google acknowledged it today, saying it was sent to the team…

We wrote to them again due to their newly-launched “community” (crowd) captioning feature. It looks awkward and not coordinated with what may be easier and faster quality captioning systems they already have in place for videos.

The goal is that all video content (huge, as you know, on YT) and everyplace online has quality captioning, when published. Access and inclusion with equal communication access, from day one, we believe that is a fundamental human right for mega-millions globally.

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Letter:

Hello …

To follow up on an earlier question (see below), …(we have) have put down some thoughts for you and Google/YouTube to consider.

Captioning is our language – and the world’s language too.

Regarding the newest captioning feature from YouTube – fan-based community captioning – we offer the following suggestions we hope will be useful.

Issue 1: Enable these features by default

Content owners have to manually navigate through a number of layers to their community settings and turn this feature on.

CCAC suggests that this should be always ON by default and that you enable the channel owners to turn it off instead.

Since many content creators already have a transcript in some shape or form – such as a script or production running sheet etc, a more efficient workflow is to source an accurate transcript first and then use Google’s voice recognition technology to auto-sync it into a caption file.

But as far as the CCAC can see, there’s no way for fans to upload an accurate transcript in this manner (or a finished caption / subtitle file).

Issue 3: There’s very little scope for collaboration

Fans are expected to work in independent silos and there doesn’t seem to be any ways to work together with other fans.

For longer videos, it would be far more efficient if there was ways to break them down into smaller, more manageable chunks that could be performed by different fans simultaneously.

Issue 4: There appears to be no way to fix the automatic machine generated cc.

CCAC suggests that for videos of shorter duration and with good quality audio, editing to correct the machine cc is a good way to create good quality captions.

Our group would like to help in any way we can to beta test this, support your efforts, and we welcome your interest and support for the CCAC.

Special thanks to CCAC member Michael Lockrey for his dedication to quality captioning issues, and all the volunteer time he donates to CCAC and others.

Readers here – we agree with their first reply to us, i.e. that video content owners, ideally, need to see and approve the CC before publication, yet this may take months or never happen unless Google/YT leads the way and pushes it ON by default – do it or the video will not be published. To use quality CC, any content provider can find low cost or free systems on the YT pages – it’s the right thing to do. Without quality CC, we have ramps for communications that are full of dangerous gaps.